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Annie Chan recalls how Santa Claus Fund Christmas boxes made Christmas merry. She still marvels that they were never stolen from the streets.

Annie Chan remains moved by the genrosity of strangers who paid for the Christmas boxes she received as a child. She's shown here with daughters Rory, 5, and Gwenyne, 14. (handout)

By Leslie FerencStar Reporter

Sun., Nov. 18, 2012

Annie Chan doesn’t remember when she first saw the stacks of colourful boxes outside the building where she lived with her family, but she does recall how that sight made her feel.

It was sometime during the 70s and through the eyes of a child, the packages decorated with pot-bellied Santas, penguins with tuques and wreaths wrapped in ribbon loomed so tall, they appeared to touch the sky. When two were delivered to her family’s apartment at Sherbourne and Dundas Sts. for her and an older sister, Chan thought it was a miracle.

“I remember the piles were huge and they were all tied up with string,” said Chan, now 40, who received the treasure filled Santa Claus boxes for several years after her mother and siblings arrived in Canada from Hong Kong. The walk down memory lane filled her heart with joy all over again. “The Christmas boxes were the only gifts we got,” Chan said in an interview, still grateful for the precious presents.

They also made those early years better for the newcomer family whose mother struggled as she raised five children on her own in a new land where everything was foreign. The Santa Claus boxes, which appeared like magic, heralded better times ahead. And they did come for the whole family said Chan, who owns Rowanwood Day Care and is a secretary at the U of T faculty of medicine.

“My childhood eyes waited in wonder around Christmas time each year for this sight to manifest,” Chan wrote in an email to the Star’s Santa Claus Fund. “As a first generation Asian-Canadian in Toronto, I came to understand Christmas and all its powers of giving, but as a kid, it was really just about the presents … it was more about the surprise than anything.”

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And what a surprise it was for the little girl who said a pretty doll was always a highlight. Chan also loved the mitts “and how they kept my ever-freezing snowball makers warm.”

She and her sister never waited long to dig to the bottom of their boxes to find the treat. It was like hitting the motherlode when they discovered a giant candy cane that lasted forever, she said.

“But as an adult I've come to cherish this gift so much more,” said Chan, the mother of daughters Gwenyn, 14, and Rory, 5. “I realize now that what really amazed me … was that no one ever took the boxes (from) ... the icy pavement.”

It was something that worried her, she admitted. “And yet, there they would sit, bound in string and safe until our super came out to deliver them mid-morning. Anything else left so carelessly unguarded in our neighbourhood would have been devoured in a blink. But this mountain was untouchable. Even I knew that without being told.”

Along with the happiness those boxes gave to so many children in the neighbourhood, Chan said they represent something even more precious to her.

“This gift imprinted on my young mind that it is possible to trust others, that some people give strangers things, and most importantly, that I wanted to become one of those people,” she said. “I have lived up to at least that one childhood goal, taught to me by the magical appearance of red and green shoe boxes.”

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